Creative 3D Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400 review

Posted by Thomas McGuire on May 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative     Product: 3D Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400

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nfiniteFX II

Similarly updated over the GeForce 3 is that the GeForce 4 Ti cards (not MX or Go) feature NVIDIA’s nfinite FX II engine. The most noticeable change over the GeForce 3 being that the GeForce 4 Ti sports an additional programmable Vertex Shader unit (1.1), making it essentially similar to the GPU used in Microsoft’s Xbox. There’s also hardware support for Pixel Shaders 1.3. Ironically enough the ATI Radeon 8500 supports Pixel Shaders 1.4, which is a more performance oriented revision.

To show off what nfinite FX II offers NVIDIA offer the Wolfman demo, this uses Per-pixel anisotropic lighting using Pixel Shaders & Matrix palette skinning using Vertex Shaders of the GeForce 4 Ti. Here’s a screenshot of this demo in action with 4X FSAA (Click on the image for the full-screen version).

As can be seen the model looks rather lovely & NVIDIA states that as regards lighting of the model - Individual hairs react to the light based on orientation of the light & structure of hair. This occurs on a per-pixel basis. For more close up images they can be downloaded at NVIDIA.

Accuview Anti-Aliasing

The GeForce 4 Ti (& MX & Go) introduce Accuview Anti-Aliasing, NVIDIA’s latest Anti-Aliasing implementation, seemingly the main changes over that offered in the GeForce 3 is that of improved performance, modified sample patterns in 2x & Quincunx FSAA & the additional 4xS FSAA mode. As regards performance improvement, one of the main reasons for this is the greatly improved memory bandwidth. As regards the modified sampling patterns in 2x & Quincunx FSAA NVIDIA offers the following diagrams to illustrate it.

By shifting the subpixel sample positions in Accuview 2x & Quincunx FSAA on the GeForce 4 it should generally result in better 2x & Quincunx FSAA image quality than on the GeForce 3 as the new sampling locations will lead to less noticeable visual errors (The previous GeForce 3 method could result in more apparent FSAA errors). The images beneath show the effect of each of the FSAA modes available in Combat Flight Simulator 2, click on an image for the full-screen version.

Rather than state the obvious like each increasingly greater FSAA level offers better image smoothing (which they do) it’s worth noticing only 4xS offers improved texture detail also and looks really good, with even finer detail than with FSAA disabled. Quincunx FSAA appears rather bizarre and I can’t honestly say I’ve really seen it make an image appear like this in other games, so it may just be an oddity with this particular game. FSAA also provides a remedy to a good deal of texture aliasing which you may otherwise experience with it disabled, e.g. texture shimmering (A lot of you out there into flight simulators will no doubt appreciate this).

Performance wise FSAA runs well on the GeForce 4 Ti 4400, mainly due to the 128MB memory available on the card, though my system is CPU limited enough for this graphics card, 2x & Quincunx FSAA run with very little performance hit, as the benchmarks reveal. 4x & 4xS do take a greater toll though.

So you want high performance FSAA but also want more detail textures? You’re in luck then with the GeForce 4 Ti…

Select 3DBlaster Ti4400 - Board Impressions nfiniteFX II & Accuview AA comparison (screenshots) Anisotropic filtering, getting the best out of it Texture compression & nView 2D Quality, Stability and DVD/MPEG Playback Performance Tests (Comanche, CodeCreatures, etc.) More Performance Tests and Final Thoughts

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